In the present era, most of the manufacturing industries are inclined towards the implementation of robotics technology for productivity enhancement. Autonomous guided vehicles have been used widely in manufacturing plants for material transportation from one location to another without involvement of human intervention. However, the localization and path planning is a challenging task in the field autonomous mobile navigation. In order to overcome this difficulty, the current study deals with the development of path planner using particle swarm optimization. With the developed path planner, the mobile robot can navigate in known environment of manufacturing plant efficiently. Simulation results are provided to validate the proposed methodology in various environments of known manufacturing plants.

Path planning; autonomous guided vehicle; particle swarm optimization; known environment; manufacturing plant.